Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

Tips for Stairs & Railings (Associative & Static)

Jeff Galbraith
Advocate

On occasion I see posts on this forum about using the stair and railing tools.  Both of these tools are quite complex and have been very difficult for most of our team to learn.  We invested some time doing tests with the tools to understand how they work in hopes of being able to get more predictable results, especially with regard to transitions and the relationship between stairs and railings.  Attached is a document we put together to document our findings by illustrating how a few of the settings impact the geometry that is created.  

 

Through this exercise we found that you get very different results in geometry when you associate a railing to a stair, vs. using the same stair as a reference to create a static railing.  We also learned a lot about how the stair geometry relates to the blue reference line used to create it.  As a result our stairs are now much cleaner..but not perfect.  

 

I hope this document helps someone out there who may be struggling with these tools.  This was created 18 months ago when we were still using version 23, but I don't think much has changed about these two tools since then.

 

Happy New Year!

Jeff G

Archicad 27 USA (full), Macbook Pro (16-inch 2023, M3 MAX, 128 GB RAM)
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